Gujarat: 86-year-old to get death certificate 38 years after son went missing

AHMEDABAD: After a decade-long legal battle, an octogenarian, Mansinh Devdhara, will finally get the death certificate of his son, who mysteriously went missing 38 years ago.
Devdhara, who had approached the judiciary in 2012, had to put up a long legal fight to get his son, Jitendrasinh, declared dead. The lower courts opined that the father was very late in approaching the court. Hence, his litigation was rejected as barred by the law of limitation.
The Gujarat high court reversed the verdicts of two lower courts with the observation that they had lost sight of the fact that “it is a human tendency to wait for many years for the return of a missing family member”. The HC made it clear that the law of limitation can’t apply in such cases.
Devdhara’s son was staying at his cousin’s house in Surat for his college studies when he went missing on January 31, 1984. The family informed the police and published advertisements in dailies, too. But they never heard from Jitendrasinh again.
So, the father approached a civil court in Surat for declaration of his son’s death, saying that an entry about in the records would avoid illegitimate claims on properties.
The civil court asked him to produce evidence of his son’s disappearance. Devdhara placed whatever he had and told the court that police records were washed away in the 2006 Surat flood.
In 2016, the civil court rejected Devdhara’s suit saying he should have approached the court within the time limit — 10 years — since his son went missing. His suit was barred by the law of limitation according to Section 108 of the Evidence Act. Devdhara unsuccessfully appealed before a district court.
When Devdhara approached the HC, Justice A P Thaker allowed his appeal and ordered the government to declare the death as having taken place on the day of disappearance. It said it was not necessary for a family to wait for seven years only. “Such waiting period may be for decades. There cannot be any assumption that after a certain period, the family members would automatically consider that the missing person has died on a particular date or within a particular point of time.”